Getting the Goodies

by Danialle Weaver

In Yiddish, it's called tchotchke (pronounced
chot-ska), that odd assortment of buttons, posters, dolls, and other memorabilia
you just can't help collecting at exhibitions and conferences like SIGGRAPH.

Each year, one or two of these souvenirs becomes a hot
commodity, and conference goers will endure just about anything to get
one. This year, attendees slogged through lines that snaked off into infinity,
sucked up to those who hand the prizes out, and even snoozed through 30-minute
presentations on sometimes-obscure software packages -- all in order to
score a trinket of their very own.

The Holy Grail of tchotchke on the exhibition floor was
The Official Dancing Baby, a creation of Kinetix, a division of Autodesk.
Baby Cha-Cha was arguably the hottest property on the exhibition floor.
"We decided to give them away because the Dancing Baby has become a pop
icon," explains Bill Tryon, a Kinetix spokesman. "Did you see the baby
on Ally McBeal?" he asks.

Another hot commodity is a doll being handed out by Intel
Corp. It's a replica of the funky dancing microchip plant worker featured
in Intel's Pentium II and MMX commercials. The faceless doll is outfitted
in what looks like a white motorcycle helmet and a blue "bunny suit,"
or the special spacesuit-like clothing worn by workers in "clean rooms,"
where microchips are produced. Attendees from the San Francisco Bay area
said the bunny-suited doll has been a hotter commodity there than the
Beanie Babies sold by McDonald's.

Another must-have item this year is a videocassette copy
of "Geri's Game," the Academy Award-winning animated short by Pixar
Animation Studios. It features an old man playing chess in the park.

The coolest souvenir -- one that actually may be worth
something some day -- is the limited-edition comic book being handed out
by Caligari Corp. The comic book, which Caligari spokeswoman Aimee Jones
describes as "the first 3D photorealistic comic book, was being signed
by three of the key people who worked on the book: Justin Knowles, an
animator; Robert Kraus, who converted the two-dimensional characters to
three-dimensional renderings; and Bill Fleming, who did the graphics.
Jones says there were only 40,000 copies made in the entire print run,
and all of them have been given away at SIGGRAPH.

By Thursday, mid-week, it seems as if every single one
of the 31,000 attendees was carrying a briefcase-like box in a distinctive
blue color being handed out by International Business Machines. What exactly
was in those boxes? "They're empty," an IBM spokesman says. The empty
box is extremely valuable to conference goers because they can put all
of their tchotchke in the empty box, seal it and ship it back to their
homes or offices effortlessly, he says.